‘Such an absurd thing to do—to cut rams and cows in two, to please God!’
Indeed it seems so; yet perhaps is better than cutting men in two to please ourselves; and we spend [[148]]thirty millions a year in preparations for doing that. How many more swiftly divided carcases of horses and men, think you, my Christian friends, have the fowls fed on, not driven away,—finding them already carved for their feast, or blown into small and convenient morsels, by the military gentlemen of Europe, in sacrifice to—their own epaulettes, (poor gilded and eyeless idols!) during the past seventy and six years of this one out of the forty centuries since Abram?
“The birds divided he not.” A turtle dove, or in Greek ‘cooing dove;’ and a pigeon, or in Greek ‘dark dove;’ or black dove, such as came to Dodona;—these were not to be cut through breast and backbone! Why? Why, indeed, any of this butchery and wringing of necks? Not wholly, perhaps, for Abram’s amusement, or God’s; like our coursing and pigeon-shooting;—but then, all the more earnestly one asks, why?
The Episcopal commentary tells you, (usefully this time) that the beasts were divided, because among all nations it was then the most solemn attestation of covenant to pass between halves of beasts. But the birds?
We are not sure, by the way, how far the cleaving might reach, without absolute division. Read Leviticus i., 15 to 17, and v., 6 to 10. ‘You have nothing to do with those matters,’ you think? I don’t say you have; but in my schools you must know your Bible, and the meaning of it, or want of meaning, at [[149]]least a little more definitely than you do now, before I let you throw the book away for ever. So have patience with it a little while; for indeed until you know something of this Bible, I can’t go on to teach you any Koran, much less any Dante or Shakspeare. Have patience, therefore,—and you will need, probably, more than you think; for I am sadly afraid that you don’t at present know so much as the difference between a burnt-offering and a sin-offering; nor between a sin-offering and a trespass-offering,—do you? (Lev. v. 15); so how can you possibly know anything about Abram’s doves, or afterwards about Ion’s,—not to speak of the Madonna’s? The whole story of the Ionic migration, and the carving of those Ionic capitals, which our architects don’t know how to draw to this day, is complicated with the tradition of the saving of Ion’s life by his recognition of a very small ‘trespass’—a servant’s momentary ‘blasphemy.’ Hearing it, he poured the wine he was about to drink out upon the ground. A dove, flying down from the temple cornice, dipped her beak in it, and died, for the wine had been poisoned by—his mother. But the meaning of all that myth is involved in this earlier and wilder mystery of the Mount of the Amorite.
On the slope of it, down to the vale of Eshcol, sat Abram, as the sun ripened its grapes through the glowing day; the shadows lengthening at last under the crags of Machpelah;—the golden light warm on Ephron’s field, [[150]]still Ephron’s, wild with wood. “And as the sun went down, an horror of great darkness fell upon Abram.”
Indigestion, most likely, thinks modern philosophy. Accelerated cerebration, with automatic conservation of psychic force, lucidly suggests Dr. Carpenter. Derangement of the sensori-motor processes, having certain relations of nextness, and behaviour uniformly depending on that nextness, condescendingly explains Professor Clifford.
Well, my scientific friends, if ever God does you the grace to give you experience of the sensations, either of horror, or darkness, even to the extent your books and you inflict them on my own tired soul, you will come out on the other side of that shadow with newer views on many subjects than have occurred yet to you,—novelty-hunters though you be.
“Behold, thy seed shall be strangers, in a land not theirs.” Again, the importunate question returns, ‘When was this written?’ But the really practical value of the passage for ourselves, is the definite statement, alike by the Greeks and Hebrews, of dream, as one of the states in which knowledge of the future may be distinctly given. The truth of this statement we must again determine for ourselves. Our dreams are partly in our power, by management of daily thought and food; partly, involuntary and accidental—very apt to run in contrary lines from those naturally to be expected of them; and [[151]]partly, (at least, so say all the Hebrew prophets, and all great Greek, Latin, and English thinkers,) prophetic. Whether what Moses, Homer, David, Daniel, the Evangelists and St. Paul, Dante, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Bacon, think on this matter, or what the last-whelped little curly-tailed puppy of the Newington University thinks, is most likely to be true—judge as you will.
“In the fourth generation they shall come hither again, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.”